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rironmonger's review
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.0
atcucchetti's review against another edition
5.0
To me, reading Oyeyemi is like listening to jazz or viewing abstract art. The reading carries you on feeling and spending time with characters rather than focusing on plot and outcomes. #ParasolAgainstTheAxe is one of my favorites so far. One could view this as an intellectual book that focuses on post-colonial displacement, the selves we contain and the ones we choose to encourage, the importance of place (literally narrated by the city of Prague) and above all the value of story. One could deep dive into what version of ourselves we allow people to experience and what version those people experience regardless of our intentions or carefully curated personas. But, that could sound intimidating as hell to some.
If Oyeyemi’s work hasn’t felt accessible to you in the past, this one is a great entry point. The novel among other things focuses on a book that many have read and in it each person reads an entirely different story. Sometimes, the same person returns to the book only to find a different story from the first time they read it. Which, in my opinion, is a great reason to experience Oyeyemi’s writing, especially this one. Readers are given permission, by Oyeyemi, to not worry about “getting it”, understanding the plot, or interpreting it correctly. Readers are invited to remember that every reader will discover something different because all of us bring different selves at different times to the reading. Oyeyemi offers both a gift and an invitation. I hope you will accept both.
gandalf's review
Never read anything else by this author despite having seen her around ever since I was in high school, and it turns out I haven't missed much. I picked this one up because I have a minor fascination with Prague despite never having been here. But this book is just another novel full of stylish nothing, and I didnt like her style very much. I think I'm tired of fiction at this point, everything I pick up just ends up being so boring...
alyssav's review
This book is very bad. Every plot point is scattered in a million directions and none of them are executed well. The writing quality is mediocre. I don’t mind unlikeable characters (in fact I love them!) but every character in this book was so irritating and had as much depth as a puddle. No one pushed the story along in any meaning way. This was the most disappointing read I had in a while.
schnurln's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
snowseau's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
ceallaighsbooks's review
challenging
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
“Hero's becoming conscious of us. Yes, I do mean you and me. The fourth party that not only calls upon her to be a third-party observer of her own exchanges but consumes the emotion and cognition at least nominally intended for her. And she hates that. Our advantage lessens as, realizing that there is access to restrict, she sets about it without immediate effect. The good news is that she's not going to try to get back at us.”
TITLE—Parasol Against the Axe
AUTHOR—Helen Oyeyemi
PUBLISHED—2024
PUBLISHER—Riverhead Books
GENRE—fiction (sui generis)
SETTING—Prague, well some of them anyway…
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Pragensia & “the Prague book”, sapphic relationships & female friendships, dark & mysterious pasts, stories & perception, connection & estrangement, books & their readers, writers, narrators, characters, etc. etc., city-narrator, residency, immigration, emigration, expatriation, refugee from war / oppression, tourism, relationships with place, regrets, fault, blame, consequences of ill-considered actions, weddings & bridal parties, socialist realist mystery, reader experience & interpretation
“That was how they smuggled conviviality across an otherwise insuperable language barrier. Hynek was the perfect person for Merlin to talk to about Prague and how much he hated this city that had taken his eye. What Merlin felt was both hatred and painful love, the kind the writers of jazz standards know all about: All of me / Why not take all of me? He couldn't risk talking to somebody who could understand what he was saying or offer advice. He was afraid of being advised to commit some deed so brutal that his beloved enemy would take notice of him once and for all; he could resist such thoughts as long as he never heard them from anybody else.”
My thoughts:
I’ve said it before & apparently I’m going to say it again but literally every time I read a new Oyeyemi book it always somehow ends up being the exact book I needed / wanted to read in that moment. Which is especially crazy because they are all so different from each other! In fact in one of their IG Lives promoting their new EP, Akwaeke Emezi said that someone once told them that “their books don’t feel like each other but they all feel like Akwaeke”—which I think also perfectly describes Oyeyemi’s oeuvre as well.
What I loved the most about PARASOL though is its lighthearted cleverness. In an interview with Jennifer Wilson for The New Yorker (see further reading), Oyeyemi said that she “can feel [her] writing changing,” & having read all of her books I can totally see that. Her last book, PEACES was similarly more lighthearted than her previous books but far more surreal, revolving around themes of trust, knowing, reciprocity, & communication in relationships, whereas PARASOL felt more realist in the sense that we (👀) are (all) present in a very real place, exploring elements & themes that concern all of us as readers & residents, travelers & thinkers.
I’ve only been to Prague once for a couple of days in July 2011 & it still stands out in my mind as one of the few cities I’ve visited that I fell hard for (along with Dublin, Stockholm, & Wellington) & would go back to in a heartbeat. Reading this book was particularly validating & eye-opening in understanding my affinity for Prague since I am so not a city person 😆 but as Oyeyemi’s novel proves, there is so much more to Prague than anything anyone has ever tried to define it by. The more I think about what it was about the city that I loved so much, the more deeply personal my ephemeral connection to that place feels.
“Pick ten people, tell each of 'em the same thing—use exactly the same wording each time, then go back and ask of the ten what you told 'em. It's guaranteed you'll hear ten things you never fuckin' said. Hardly anybody talks about what it is they've actually heard or read; we only say what we were thinking about while someone was trying to talk to us. And when all's said and done, that's only natural, isn't it...”
I would recommend this book to readers who are never bothered about things like plot or maps & enjoy getting well & truly lost in both cities & books. This book is best read on the balcony of a small flat overlooking the Vltava with a cold bottle of Kofola & a fresh pack of cigarety sparta.
Final note: A huge thankyou to Riverhead Books for an advanced finished copy of this book! 🙏🏻
“The aversion lingered and made its way into lullabies that were sung about the bandits. Sleep, little one, or the shepherd milkmaid bandit will make you walk her Way of the Goat. Go to sleep RIGHT NOW or the mad baker bandit will make you eat bread until you pop ... etc. Those lullabies are extant. When I sang them to my own children, it worked a treat every single time: the kiddies were absolutely bricking it. And so I tip my hat to those three lovers: immortal after all, impossible after all.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CW // sexual content, sex work, death of parent, suicide, nazis, pedophilia (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Season: Spring
Further Reading—
- Sharma, Ruchira. “Novelist Helen Oyeyemi on Why the City of Prague has Main Character Energy”. Intelligence Squared. Spotify, Feb 14, 2024.
- Wilson, Jennifer. “The New Yorker Interview: Helen Oyeyemi Thinks We Should Read More and Stay in Touch Less.” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/helen-oyeyemi-thinks-we-should-read-more-and-stay-in-touch-less. Mar 3, 2024.
- Everything else by Helen Oyeyemi
- PRAGUE WITH FINGERS OF RAIN by Vítězslav Nezval—TBR
- DE PROFUNDIS by Oscar Wilde—TBR
- “The Secret Miracle,” by Jorge Luis Borges—TBR
- INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino—TBR
- THE GOOD SOLDIER ŠVEJK by Jaroslav Hašek—TBR
- THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera
- THE SUICIDE CLUB by Robert Louis Stevenson—TBR “…Florizel, the habitually incognito Prince of Bohemia from three crime stories Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1878. Stevenson's Florizel dearly loved to out-pretend a pretender.”
- NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen—“The epigraph was from Austen's Northanger Abbey: Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?”
- IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELLER by Italo Calvino
- OUTLINE by Rachel Cusk—TBR
- THE END OF MR Y by Scarlett Thomas—TBR
Favorite Quotes—
“What, then, was Hero to do with the frantic buzz of being more hateworthy than Sofie? It was too tempting to adorn her pride with it, like a living brooch that stung and stung again.”
“…Paradoxical Undressing, the "Prague book"... Its cover image depicted a lace umbrella encased in slowly melting ice, and the book itself bore the hallmarks of a very, very limited edition. It was pamphlet slim, but some pages folded over on themselves and opened out to a size quadruple the length and width of the cover.
“The book's epigram was a few lines of translated verse originally authored by somebody named Nezval:
“‘…My eyes drink in the lights of the great merry-go-round
Whose ringing chimes call home
All barges and stray horses
Whose ringing chimes call home
All sparks of light’
“From this, Hero, who was most unequivocally not a spark of light, deduced that her home must lie elsewhere. She hadn't brought a backup book, and could only hope that this Paradoxical Undressing wasn't going to be a lot of operatic bawling that could have conveyed just as much substance in an indoor voice.”
“…no one knows if it's too late, or whether there's such a thing as "too late" when it comes to books and remedying the punishments incurred by those who write them, read them, and circulate them. But this is the best he can do ... Lepší než drátem do voka, že jo? Better than a poke in the eye.”
“Only a matter that rests on three separate points can be settled for ever.”
“Blinking is a labor-intensive production, as is smiling, breathing, digestion, and everything else. Immortality?! How about being content with handling the wear and tear of a single day?
“Mikulás, the third son of a Moravian count, had spent his life cheerfully staying out of his eldest brother's way, the unspoken message being: The title's all yours, psycho. His medical training had been formally administered by monks. But the monks weren't responsible for his theory that we die when we can no longer hang on to the delusion that embodiment is a viable project. It isn't, and never was, and the longer we keep trying, the worse it gets. And if you asked Mikulás how he'd come to think like this, he said he'd read it somewhere, and that it didn't matter where. He was no scholar; he was doing what he could to help his patients feel less humiliated by the patent truth that we are not able to be. An inability we demonstrate daily.”
“…problematizing the desire to live yet unable to forgive themselves for dying.”
“So what actually was in their gift? It seemed to have something to do with the way they were together, and their way of perceiving and reaching each other that was one to one to one... possibly more; they'd never thought about expanding their resources this way until now. To reach out and touch she or he who opposes you. Without enmity, indeed with (or through) some emotion there still may not yet be a name for.”
“‘Just some man,’ Mikulás said, contemplating the nobleman. ‘That's what I thought about this one. They grow on you, though, the ones you just keep seeing around.’”
“Hero went to turn the page, but didn’t like the way her hand trembled. She had to admit that the question had thrown her; it combined reproach (a “Where are you” that doubled as “What’s your reason for not being here?”) with ... what felt like actual inquiry. The narrator of the story didn’t know where she was, and they wanted to know. Furthermore: it seemed to Hero that the story she’d been reading was narrated by a person distinct from whoever it was that had written the words—she checked the name on the cover—Merlin Mwenda. There was no refining the matter beyond that. Here Hero Tojosoa was with her right hand all unstable because, in the fissure between one printed sentence and another, someone had made a sudden attempt to find her.”
“She was getting closer and closer to nowhere; that is, to finding out what nowhere is.”
“…pathos-free—it was as if death were just another stamp in their passport.”
“Whatever else she might or might not have done, she’d definitely tucked the book up in bed, reveling in the treatment of a book as if it were a person. Also... come to think of it, this wasn’t the book that she’d put to bed. The cover was the same, the author photo was the same, the publication year and printing press were identical, and so was the biography (as far as she could ascertain by skim-reading). The book was significantly heavier; there were more pages than there had been before…”
“She found her jewelry pouch in her hand luggage, took out the longest earring she had, and marked her place in the book with it.”
“A seemingly fractal array of towers, turrets, and spires. She tried not to frown—glassy indifference would have been a more comprehensive put-down—but she couldn't help it. What right did these paired steeples have to hold the full moon between them like that? Before her very eyes, the moon escaped its stone guards, then fell into and struggled out of a series of verdigris-coated oubliettes. The poor thing did this until dawn, when it was the sun's turn to rise into its own peril.”
“The more breathtaking the visions, the more melodious the duet between grandeur and humility…”
“…when it comes to dumplings, there is no competition: there is only deliciousness.”
“She was no longer invested in the effort of displaying uniqueness, or forcing somebody else to exhibit theirs. It was beginning to look as if she and the loves she pursued really were just like everybody else, even in the ways they tried to prove that they weren’t.”
“Dorothea Gilmartin may not have earned her own living, but she budgeted as if she did.”
“Uncle Vavia gave her one of these each Christmas, and by New Year’s Eve she was always disappointed in herself for having lost it already. The scale was meant to stay in her wallet, multiplying whatever was in there, but that wasn’t the reason she regretted her negligence. Her peasant inclinations wouldn’t let her off; that was all... she wanted to keep every pretty gift that was given her, whether that be a carp scale or a birth name.”
“A dry-eyed tale always loses out to a tearful one, so oh, yes, Dorothea Gilmartin hates tears.”
“The epigraph was from Austen’s Northanger Abbey: ‘Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?’”
“She cared because Josefstadt and its offshoots in wider Prague cared, but hourly she was moved to remind one of her guests that they were getting carried away with their expectations: ‘So it’s no Prager Tagblatt. Aber besser als ein Stich ins Auge, oder?’ Better than a poke in the eye…”
“‘Oh.’ At a certain point in the evening when it seemed as if they were drunk enough to make confessions, Irma liked to ask her dance partners if they were villains. If they said that they were, she’d ask how bad a villain, and she’d also ask them to prove it. ‘I am the goddess of villains,’ Irma would say. ‘Worship me, and I’ll reward you with invincibility.’”
“He was the very picture of drollery—partly due to the gormlessness of his grin, but mostly on account of his preposterous purple beret: it slouched across his head like a fat grape befuddled by its own juices.”
“…how disgusting words are. How disgusting that that’s what can be done with them—remembering something and destroying that memory by speaking in impossibilities, making the event play out in two places at exactly the same time.”
“‘But seriously,’ Conor said to her later, as they walked over to the salon, ‘a place can live in you without letting you know about it for the longest time. That could be why you don’t like it here. Who likes being thrust into their own insides without a word of warning?’”
“‘Oh, if I could swap my life for the life of any other being, Denisa isn’t the one I’d force to be me while I’m being her—I wouldn’t want to do that with Veronika either, I wouldn’t even want to be this book they’re telling me about. I’d swap with whatever it is that’s happened between them and the book. The process so personal it’s a person...”
“…Some kind of illusion that it’s the best that’s being brought out instead of the worst. If not the best, then at the least ‘the real you’ and ‘the real them’..."
“What if the chemical reaction you're describing is what goes on between you and your best friends, you and the person you have a child with, you and anybody you get interested in? I just want to...should I just go away from everybody?”
“That doesn’t sound like me. Which is not to say that it couldn’t have been.”
“‘Well, all right—let’s hear it: How would I go about stopping another person from finding out what they love?’
‘By making that person a donkey or a cart—by loading them up with all the things you think and feel and telling them that those thoughts and feelings are for them. By telling them—and I have been ambushed in this way when I pass through graveyards, Hero—that you died for them. Or if you’re still living, you can coo that you’re living for that person. I will find out what I love irregardless, Hero…’”
“She googled ‘How to tell if you're being truthful’ three or four times a year but had never found any answers that helped.”
“‘Live with me, here, please,’ he asked her, above the blazing river and beneath the sky that sparkled with newly sown stars. This had to be it, the unreachable place that reached you after you'd set every other place aside.”
“It was a union not adequately described by the document that was handed to them once the vows were concluded. All it said was that the marriage of one Wendell Wechsler and one Hero Tojosoa had been recorded in the parish register, along with a date and other small sundries. That’s Pragensia for you.”
“Still, it wasn't so very terrible, was it, having to start all over again-better than a poke in the eye... lepší než drátem do voka, že jo...”
“It's like you’ve arrived too early for your appointment with the present moment, and you’re stuck in some kind of waiting room. Maybe while you're busy getting square-eyed you’ll see something that lets you know it’s OK to stop waiting for ‘now’.”
“…Ataraxia’s reason for being, i.e., the extraordinary thing that might not have happened if there had been no Ataraxia.”
“A lot of people who are happy to sponsor all manner of financially unprofitable endeavors don't want to give artists a penny. Especially the sort of artists you get nowadays. ‘What will you make with this money?’ we ask suspiciously, and if we receive an answer, it isn't one we feel we understand. Maybe if it was a do-or-die decision between giving money to an artist or giving it to a drug addict who's just shared their full shopping list, we'd manage to choose the artist without feeling as if we're siding with some representative of the Void. Maybe…”
“…it seemed to Ataraxia that those who spoke only Czech always seemed to reserve the option of denying their passion. Not out of fear, but because they knew that the faithful sometimes had to forgo laughter, and that wasn't something they ever wanted to do.”
“‘Just let me stay,’ she whimpered. ‘Why not go and harass some overzealous bachelor party? Let me stay. Come on. Please. I'll be good.’
‘We'd be imbeciles if we actually believed you, Thea. Besides, it's not about being good, bad, wanted, not wanted, liked, disliked, or any of those things,’ Ms. Mole said. ‘This simply isn't a place for you, and you've got to go…’”
“…I used to be all Jane Eyre about that kind of thing: you are the only person who actually knows who you are, so everyone else can and will just say whatever they're gonna say about you, right?”
“Yeah, forget about this place, it's really not what you think it is…”
“‘Set me as a seal on your heart,’ she murmured.”
“And now this book, this city, had Hero saying ‘I think’ about something she knew…”
“Well, you're going to have to get the book back from Denisa, aren't you? Because you can't leave without it.”
“…two freedoms we both cherish: the liberty to let yesterday be fucking yesterday and the liberty to leave...”
“…what could she give him so that she could go somewhere that wasn't an adamant squiggle on the face of reason? She supposed she could always ask if there was anything he needed her for, but how scary if there was something, and how dispiriting if there wasn't. These were basically the same tenterhooks she was on with her son, and the same again with Sofie, Thea, J.-P., Yolande, Gaspar... everybody. She was resolute in her hook breaking, and the hooks seemed just as resolute in their almost instantaneous renewal.”
“Hey, you've noticed it too, right? That this city might not actually be a city, but... a dissociative state of some kind? A nonstop paternoster lift that's too fast for history to step into without severed ankles? Could this Prague be... a break? A snapping of the world's wire? Isn't this why any faction that has occupied this city has known deep down—must have known, unless they were complete idiots—that the more they seemed to get their way the less they were in actual control of anything at all around here? I just wanted to, you know, ask that and see if asking brought anything to mind for anybody else…”
“How come every time I look at this book it's become another book?!”
“‘…Maybe you were so... open, or left the book so open that something entered it? Something like a genius locus that, instead of simply being, also wants to find out where it is—“where” in time and space, I mean—and that genius locus started looking for a person willing and able to tell them…?’
“Merlin smiled at her. ‘Oh, I'd love it if such mayhem could be brought about by the written word. Well, I'd love it but I'd also be shitting myself...’”
“But for all that this place was every place that went through people's minds as they read about it, Hero still didn't want to stay. Her mind was always changing anyway; that was what minds did. And she refused to forfeit the possibility of being in places other than... these ones.”
“He wrote his ending. All you have to do is read it.”